October 29, 2006
Review Corner
I mentioned this documentary when I ordered it on October 6. John Fund called filmmaker Phelim McAleer the "Anti-Michael Moore." He uses the documentary as polemic format (though I hope not the mendacity) of The Great Scruffy One From Flint to champion -- instead of destroy -- the cause of modernity and freedom.
McAleer becomes involved with the controversy around a new gold mine in Rosia Montana, Romania. A Canadian firm wants to replace the run down, polluting Communist-era mine with a modern one, develop housing and infrastructure, and provide jobs to the blighted, dying community.
Phelim McAleer meets George Lucian, a young Romanian who wants to see the new mine so that he can get employment. Lucian, who has never strayed from his village, agrees to follow McAleer to Madagascar to see another poor village whose inhabitants, like Rosia Montana's, overwhelmingly want a new modern mining project to proceed. McAleer leaves Lucian in the sunshine when he goes to Chile, where a remote village also looks forward to a new mine.
Sadly, McAleer also introduces us to a cadre of pompous gasbag environmentalists who are doing all they can to stop these projects. McAleer juxtaposes the speech of big city, wealthy. modern environmentalists with the exigencies of the places they describe. Francoise Heidebroek describes Rosia Montana as a delicate paradise which should support itself with agriculture and tourism. Lucian gives a different tour. There is some mountain beauty, yes, but the people live in ramshackle huts with no modern conveniences. Most have no indoor plumbing and use outhouses in the -20C winter cold.
Ms. Heidebroek and like minded NGO staff in Madagascar, Argentina, and London feel no compunction denying Lucian, and huge swaths of the world's poor, the opportunity to have jobs, cars, heat and plumbing.
McAleer gets pro modernity views from other journalists and from Professor Deepak Lal (whose excellent book "Reviving the Invisible Hand" recently got a favorable review). They conclude that the environmentalist NGOs are now the enemies of the world's poor. McAleer has a guest editorial in The Rocky Mountain News on that topic. The idea (to which I once subscribed) that environmentalists are earnest and misguided but harmless is laid low.
A DVD is available on his website for $12.99. Buy one for yourself and at least one for a gift. Silence bristles when I discuss the anti-modernity agenda of the environmentalist movement. This is admittedly a small slice of a large movement but it shows a subtext that can be extrapolated to most all of the environmental NGOs and many of their supporters.
Five stars.